The Miner and the Copper

The copper in question claims not to have been suppressing a smile, and still doesn’t support the miners. This is just more bullshit Guardian myth-building, a society riven by class conflict trying to pretend that there is some positive tale of community to be found in a sorry tale. It’s also very convenient pro-union boosterism coming at a time when British unions are running a racist campaign against foreign workers, aka the only people in england who do their jobs, and the only people who clean up British peoples’ rubbish.

British society is broken, and no amount of desperate searching for fellow-feeling between lower middle-class yobs is going to fix it.

“coming at a time when British unions are running a racist campaign against foreign workers”.

Please, the word should probably be “xenophobic” not “racist”. If you’re going to favour us with sub-Dalrympian nonsense, please make it semi-literate.

‘sg’, have you, you know, _read_ the agreement that the Lindsey oil workers got in return for going back to work? Why not take a look at it before you accuse them of a racist campaign? These were their demands:

No victimisation of workers taking solidarity action.
All workers in UK to be covered by NAECI Agreement
Union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members
Government and employer investment in proper training / apprenticeships for new generation of construction workers
All Immigrant labour to be unionised.
Trade Union assistance for immigrant workers – via interpreters – to give right of access to Trade Union advice – to promote active integrated Trade Union Members

Lots of racism there, isn’t there? Or perhaps not.

By the way, if anyone is interested in the policing of the 1984 miners’ strike, I note that there will be an exhibition on the topic running at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham, opening this September.

I would hope (an immigrant writes) that this discussion will not be instantly derailed by the trolling in the openig post.

I don’t think (a foreign worker writes) that it is trolling to point out that that Guardian article is a desperate attempt to paper over a very large crack in British society. It is seeking to find common ground between a man who cannot speak for himself (because he’s dead) and a man who disagrees completely with the journalist’s wishful impression of the picture.

And it is doing so at a time when the Guardian wants to see more strikes and union activism of the sort pictured there, only targetting foreign workers. Polly Toynbee, the conscience of the British left, said so herself. In the new strikes, of course, both the guys in that picture will be on the same side of the line, and it will be Ahmed “Cheap Labour” on the other.

_that Guardian article is a desperate attempt _ ….

to promote an exhibition and a TV programme celebrating the work of one of the Guardian’s most distinguished photographers.

In #10 – those lads aren’t actually playing football, are they? That’s a football all right, but they look to me like they’re playing rugby league.

Either way, as anybody who’s been to Boundary Park can testify, it’s probably perishingly cold.

I’m surprised no-one else who was around at the time has pitched in on the smiling. I was involved in several melees, and many encounters between miners and their supporters on the one hand, and coppers on the other. Many were peaceful, and especially at pits where the same coppers came over and again there was often an uneasy rapport. Certainly there was smiling, if often nervous. Some of the miners were very funny in their taunts of the police and, as in that picture, there were often coppers with enough of a sense of humour to smile. The article is right that there was a world of difference between Met officers and those from other forces.

The most tense situation I was in that didn’t break into a fight was not in the miners strike but outside Oxford police station after a NF/ANL chase. 3 ANLers were in the police station, arrested for some reason, and about 150 of us were outside the police station shouting “Let them out, Let them out”. Suddenly, a brick went through a barred window (thrown by a schoolfriend of mine, whom I saw do it). Everybody froze, and there were 2 seconds of something close to terror on both sides. Then, some wag shouted “Let us IN, Let us IN”. The chanter was looking the sergeant in charge straight in the eye with a grin on his face and, I swear, I saw the sergeant start to giggle. A roar of laughter went through the crowd, and Peter Moss (a local councillor) was allowed in and go the charges dropped within a few minutes.

Rhetoric and impaled bankers: a revolutionary new trolley-car paradigm, together with an introduction to problematology. 600 words.

Am I the only one who hasn’t figured out why the miner turned appraiser in the US blinked and stared rudely at you until he recognized that you were English?

Alex, dsquared, the Guardian article actually quotes the cop saying he doesn’t remember smiling. It’s not trolling. He said so himself, and Alex’s quote supports that. The miner is dead, he’s not there to support it.

The Guardian is trying to create a mythology around the miner’s strike of people just “doing their job” when really it was two powerful forces of lower-middle class struggle coming together, and one of those forces won – the force that supported Thatcher. That force is the one which is now driving the racist demonstrations against Mr. “Cheap Labour”. The Guardian wants to support that force, because that’s all that’s left of class activism in England, but they’re uneasy with the compromise required of anyone who supports a racist union movement. So they have to manufacture continuity between the deeply divided working class of the 80s and the united, racist working class of now.

They do this by pretending the lower middle class policeman was smiling at the lower middle class miner, when really he was just wondering if he could bash him. Which is why Alex didn’t quote the other miners from that article – because they identified the rift very clearly.

Yes I did Chris and I don’t assume you made it up. The Union wants to unionise people who are going to be on barges in the river for 4 months. This is a sop. Read their slogans – “our country our jobs”, “british jobs for british workers”. They are tied to a free market left wing party which sold its soul to the City 10 years ago, and which coined a slogan – “British jobs for British workers” – which would be considered too toxic to touch by a left wing party in any other country in the developed world. You can pretend they care, but the reality is that the only demand in that list which is of even marginal benefit to the Italian workers is the interpreters, and even that’s probably a play for local jobs since the company has probably got a few onsite anyway. Union dues? They’ll be gone in 4 months, what benefit is that to Italian workers who are in any case protected by local employment law? And what protection will it be when they are confined to their barges because the local town is too racist for them?

No, the local workers need to be asking themselves why they couldn’t beat these Italians to a job even though the Italians would be paid local wages PLUS accomodation. The reason is undoubtedly that the local contracting company was demanding too much profit, and/or the British workers couldn’t do the job. We know a British company lost the contract from failure to deliver. Why should we think this is anything except racist protectionism?

I have no idea on the bigger issues here, but do they really have the “british jobs for british workers” for a slogan? That’s very uncomfortably close to the Illyria for Illyrians thing.

do they really have the “british jobs for british workers” for a slogan?

Not really, no. It was a big slogan at the start of the dispute, but by the time it was settled it had more or less disappeared – and, as Chris has shown, you can’t honestly and seriously characterise the terms on which the dispute was settled in that way.

In any case, the issue was never about immigration or about individuals travelling to get work; it was about a sub-contractor bussing in a workforce and then bussing it out again. As the Circolo Karl Marx (an ex-pat group of Rifondazione Comunista supporters) put it, what the sub-contractor was doing was a question of services mobility, not labour mobility.

I assume we’re going to have a lot of British contributions to this discussion, as apparently none of you do any work. According to our prejudiced friend.

Picture 4 reminds me of an anecdote from Martin Bell’s memoirs: he was told very firmly not to describe them on air as “catholic refugees” because this would only inflame the situation. He protested: “Do you think anyone’s going to mistake them for Protestants? That one’s got a crucifix in a pram!”

sg:

Alex, dsquared, the Guardian article actually quotes the cop saying he doesn’t remember smiling

the article:

Among the material he found was a line of negatives of the whole Orgreave sequence; not a solitary shot but four, taken within a couple of seconds. The second frame is the famous one: “Perfect geometry, Cartier Bresson’s ‘the moment’, a picture which locks you in, wondering what’s going to happen next,” says Thorpe. But look at the last two on the strip of contact prints. In both, Castle’s grin stands out from his poker-faced colleagues, while Brealey is clearly clowning on with his ‘inspecting’.

Just to make it clear, if perhaps only to sg, my first post was making the point (snarkily) that sg was deciding that “British” , “Italian” and “Polish” (the nationalities involved in the dispute) were racial designations by his incontinent use of the word “racist”. I assumed a knowledge of the specifics of the case amongst people who would want to comment on the photo in the post would help them interpret my remarks in the way they were intended. I myself never believed the workers at Lindsey are either racist or xenophobic, and the evidence provided by Chris above shows they are not.

Amusingly, I assumed sg to be a Daily Mail reader of some kind, hence my accusation of his “sub-Dalrympian” rant. Now I know he’s just a troll, I shall write no more.

AlanM, if I were a daily mail reader i would have been supporting the strikers, so that assumption was pretty silly. But thanks for the clarification, as I said before I’m really uninterested in the fine distinction between xenophobia and racism. Whichever one the British want to use as the solution for their current problems, it’s not going to end well.

PhilM, Gordon Brown defended his use of BJFBW after the strikers used it “against him” (if indeed they were, since he coined it with the full knowledge of how it would be used as a rallying cry for protectionist labour activists – or do you really think he is so stupid he wouldn’t see that?). And the Guardian is definitely comfortable with it, I read three opinion pieces in one week defending the strikers and their use of the phrase, and there were about 1000 comments saying “oh look, the Guardian finally gets it”.

The company website stated clearly that they were paying their Italian workers the local wage. There was much debate about this because the “posted worker directive” requires this. “cheap labour” has been a rallying cry for the rights of 3rd world workers for years, it’s verrrry interesting to see it used in this country as a euphemism for “dirty eyetie”.

Nonetheless Phil, the company stated they were paying equal wage. The contract required a company with a group of existing workers to do a 4 month job, and wasn’t won on the basis of the cheapest labourers.

Fair enough point Chris, I certainly have a bee in my bonnet about “broken britain”, and i can be unreasonable about it. My apologies.

But I do think that there is a vague relationship between the Guardian’s rejection of the Tory narrative of “broken Britain”, their unwillingness to see anything wrong with those recent strikes, and a generally revisionist/blind viewpoint on working class attitudes towards race. Class division is what is the underlying cause of Englands social problems, the Toynbees of the world won’t see it because it implies that they are the problem; so in the end they have to deflect the criticism onto foreigners almost as much as the Daily Mail likes to. In the process they have to construct a wishful narrative of past class struggles in order to try and pretend that England is a society which can get along together as currently constructed.

On a slightly different note, I had a generally positive view of the miners’ strike, and I certainly sympathise with, for example, Alex’s respect for Arthur Scargill. But I do wonder, if they had won against Thatcher would anyone dare take the unions on now over coal and global warming?

Harry, I think you’ll find this book of photographs of urban, working-class Britain in the ’70s and early ’80s riveting: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Such-Thing-Society-Photography-Collection/dp/1853322652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235825788&sr=1-1

Oh thanks, Jonathan, that looks brilliant. Ordered.

I feel for the author/editor though. How annoying to have to use your middle name all the time because your name has, otherwise, been wrecked by someone else!